Nine years seems like long enough to wait to resurrect this thread. At 2015-01-20T19:57:25-0500, Doug McIlroy wrote: > [Ralph Corderoy wrote:] > > Thought it might be of interest given troff's long-time S\s-2MALL\s0 > > C\s-2APS\s0, especially used in the formatting of Unix. IIRC, Dennis > > Ritchie said they did it because the CAT gave them the possibility, but > > it was regretted for the UNIX/Unix confusion it caused. > > I think this is urban legend. Small caps were not used in UNIX manuals or > in the Bell System Technical Journal articles about UNIX. Fairly early on, > we in the Unix lab began to treat Unix as a proper noun, but the lawyers > had trademarked the uppercase name and got their way in many publications, > including the books by Kernighan and Ritchie and Kernighan and Pike. > U\s-2NIX\s0 was very rare, if it ever happened at all.
I have found a 48-year-old instance of it in the wild! Al Kossow just this week uploaded his copy of a printed Sixth Edition manual to Bitsavers. The mixed-case-but-still-small-caps (mis-)usage occurs in only place that I can see, on page 3. This page of the manual was not produced by the CSRC, but by "AT&TCo SPCS", and/or "the Unix Operating System Generic, PGC-1C300, Issue 2". So presumably C. D. Perez, who appears to claim responsibility for that version of the document, was not familiar with the typographical conventions of the Unix lab. https://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/6th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_197601.pdf > I recoil from text infected with capital pox, and don't see small caps as > much improvement. They do make sense in all-caps text, but sporadic > S\s-2MALL\s0 C\s-2APS\s0 or anything like it is not a cure for the pox. Regards, Branden
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